The antidote to ideologies

REASONS TO LEAVE THE EU, #9 the Portguguese Black Hole, #10 the illegal & uncontrolled expenditure of the eurogroup

Number 9 is Portugal. I love Portugal, but it has a debt that stands at 360% of gdp. So it really isn’t a viable eurozone member. I watched and listened – my jaw heading towards the carpet – three months ago as Fiskalunion FinMin Wannabe Führer Wolfgang Schäuble talked about the “tremendous revival” of Portugal’s economic fortunes: by which (I assume) he meant that it was costing the ECB a fortune to keep it upright by buying debt bonds.

Bu if we take even a cursory look at the smaller of the two Iberian States, it’s not hard to see the country is on the ropes: Portugal’s biggest lender Banco Espirito Santo cost €5bn to rescue, and so far non-performing loans are up by a worrying 13% – that’s one in eight. All the pots where the pensions and welfare used to be were emptied years ago, and the IMF (increasingly Devil’s Advocate these days) has profound doubts about any Lisbon Goverment being able to pass the programme of cuts Troikanauts are already demanding. Indeed, the Left anti-austerity Parties look almost certain win a parliamentary majority in October. Party leader Antonio Costa says he will reverse creditor-imposed reforms wipe away forever “this obsession with austerity”.

Looking at this chart, one can see Costa’s point:

If you were setting out to prove what a load of old cock the austerity ‘policy’ is, then this one does the job in one go. Note how the country that has received the most ‘help’ from our austere friends in Brussels-am-Berlin has seen 40% wiped off its gdp in six years. But even Portugal (over that same period) has seen a net loss of 10% – only improving after it left ‘the programme’ – with its debt getting bigger and bigger.

Of course, the technical term ‘old cock’ is based upon the presupposition that the idea of austerity in the first place was to get ClubMed out of trouble – whereas we now know that eurogrope doesn’t GAF about the economies of ClubMed, it wants control over the members of it. Germany in particular doesn’t care because its trade with countries outside the EU has grown exponentially in the last few years….thanks to a cheap euro, kept that way by permanent crisis in ClubMed. It’s not a situation designed to make the victors want to “help”, is it?

Well, we’ve been here before, but the Portuguese are forewarned in the light of eurogrope’s strangulation of Syriza in Greece. And at roughly the same time later this year, the gropers will have Spain to deal with. Wolfie himself, meanwhile, is getting tumescent at the thought of taking on France.

Britain is not in the euro. Given the mess it’s in, only Blair and Mandelson still want to be in it.

Now imagine Britain had never joined the EU. Do you think we’d want to join it today? Of course we wouldn’t. Something worth remembering, I think, as we get closer to June 2016.

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As I’ve posted before about eurogrope, it is an informal gathering within the EU; it answers to nobody (no change there) and has no legal right to exist as a decision-making body whatsoever. Yet the very presence of Herr Doktor Wolfgang Stranglelove in its midst is enough to confer power upon it……..and power is all that counts in the European Bunion.

Now it transpires that this Troika2 gathering in turn has the power to hire consultants using EU taxpayers’ money, but without any permission as such. These consultants in turn use taxpayers’ money to employ sub-contractors…again, with no budgetary control at all.

At the first level, Alvarez and Marsal, BlackRock, Oliver Wyman, and Pimco constructed all the eurozone bailouts. The invoices received and paid by the EU to date exceed €80 million. Public tenders are rarely if ever involved in the award of these contracts; often there are potential conflicts of interest involving links to investment funds and other financial service providers. And the subcontractors they hire in turn almost always include one or more of the “Big Four” accountancy companies – Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

So what we have here is just eight suppliers with their fingers in an enormous pie: paid for by us, but accountable to nobody….having themselves been hired by organisations with no legal status inside the EU.

Small wonder, therefore, that none of these companies has been prepared to audit the EU’s accounts for the last twenty years. One simply can’t imagine why.

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Send these posts – and others collected at the Dedicated 100 Reasons to leave the EU page – to your local MPs. Demand an answer as to how they feel about these self-styled, hugely expensive centres of illegally acquired power. See if they can give you a straight answer about why staying in the EU would be a good idea.

14 thoughts on “REASONS TO LEAVE THE EU, #9 the Portguguese Black Hole, #10 the illegal & uncontrolled expenditure of the eurogroup”

I wouldn’t be telling my MP anything he doesn’t already know. Getting him to GAF is a different matter. They all do as they are told. All the bluster and bullshit about reform/referendum is just that, bluster and bullshit designed to distract, the UK is not about to leave the EU, now or in the future, let’s be honest here, Washington is forbidding it, and the Prime Mincer does exactly as Washington tell him.
I have been reading The Slog for about 8yrs now, and I have lost count of how many times the demise of the EU has been predicted, and as I see it, nothing over that 8yr period has changed, all the machinations over Greece and the like have effectively passed into history, it’s old news now, as will be Spain, Portugal et al.
What Washington wants, Washington gets when it comes to Europe, we are but vassal states.
By rights it all should have crashed to the ground by now but, it hasn’t because it’s all a game, their game, their ball and their rules. The ‘Gordon Brown episode’ was a mishap, allowing him to appear as if he had ‘saved the World’ that won’t be allowed to occur again, that’s for sure.
They crushed Syriza and they will crush any other usurper who thinks that they can reverse Berlin’s policies. Brussels-am-Berlin wields supreme unchallenged power, the power to literally starve nations into submission, anti-austerity parties don’t stand a chance.
Time will tell.

So, the PTB will have their way in the 2016 referendum. When, however, the population of the UK hits 75 million in 2035, including a 25 percent Muslim and non White element in England, whose capital city centre will be, as far as residential property is concerned, 90 percent owned by foreign non residents, you will get a resounding NO vote. I will be 84, with luck still living on the South Downs, and glossing over my sale of a Belgravia freehold in 1988!

People do trot out the old chestnut about EU not wanting to trade with UK if we are out . I believe we exported about 2.6 billion to Germany in June and imported about 5.6 billion so If we voted out on Friday a new facility would be in place by Monday ,you could bet the farm on it and as others have posted previously the EFTA is still in place.
JW you are boldly doing more than most ,top man.
KFC more than a grain of truth in that but it’s deeply depressing.

The juxtopositions of various EU elections may be the most interesting bit to follow next….along with the extent of The Sprouts determination to “get the correct result at all costs ! ”

For example …the Catalonian parliamentary election will be held on Sunday, 27 September 2015. At stake will be all a mandate to go for full independance from Spain with all the implications on spanish banks, gdp, debt and how the euro-gnomes sort that one out when it comes to a common currency. This is just one week before Portugal votes …so any scare tactics or heavy handedness by the OberFuhurers of Brussels-am-Berlin may well have a nasty knock on effect on that result

…Then the French regional elections will be Dec 15 with Marine Le Pen standing to test public opinion on her run for president and should give us all a pretty fair idea of the present French public opinion of the EU and Austerity. The 2015 Spanish general election will be held on or before Sunday, 20 December 2015, just a week later again…..If Le Pen does well…it surely puts a large question mark over the entire Euro Project.

If the EZ is still rattling along with no wheels on its wagon by the start of 2016…The next Irish general election must take place no later than 3 April 2016…..but may well be in March to avoid any unfortunate link to the centenary of The Easter Uprising ! …just in time for the UK Referendum campaigns to really get into gear ….I wonder if the Irish are that happy with their lot?

graham no, we most certainly are not happy with our lot. skulduggery, lies, broken promises,despicable banks controlling equally despicable pols. we will see a swing to independent candidates and sinn fein. with a little luck a 1 legged government that is unable to continue the damage done by kenny et al. atb cc

JW – I dont need multiple reasons to leave the eu two choices but only one central banker

Follow the path as outined in the Lisbon Treaty to adopt the euro .. go on or GTFO asap because if you are not a king (the UK is not) then you are a slave. All proUK businesses with the EU evolving to EZ are selling the population into slavery. YOU CAN BUTCHER THESE LATER.

One concept, if you are not a king then you are A SLAVE AND THAT IS A TRUTH – always. Hence has to be NO or we fight, there can be no other concept and have learned you do not negotiate with politicians get rid because the deal will be changed later so you lose later.

@ Lampitt – “as others have posted previously the EFTA is still in place.”
And as I repeatedly post (though it seems to sail over everyone’s head) the more significant factor is that a country does NOT need to be a member of the EU to trade with it. Such non-European nations as S. Korea, Mexico, Norway, Iceland,Chile, South Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, all have free trade agreements with the EU, which is also in negotiations with the ASEAN countries, Japan, MercoSur countries, India, not to mention much of Africa. Then there’s the EU Euro-Mediterranean (trade) Agreement which includes Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel etc.

The EU’s own website states that 90% of world trade in the next 15-20 years will be outside the EU. They clearly realise where their interests lie.

This whole issue makes a mockery of the claim Britain needs to be a member of the EU to trade with it. Unfortunately, you almost certainly won’t read about it in the MSM, proving that if a lie is told often enough, it becomes a fact in the minds of those who can’t be bothered to seek the truth, i.e. the majority.